THE HAGUE — The European Commission should act “as soon as possible” to give clear guidance on U.S. sanctions against the International Criminal Court, its top administrative official told POLITICO in an interview.

Osvaldo Zavala Giler, who oversees the day-to-day functioning of the Hague-based court as the institution’s registrar, said his job became “preparing for sanctions” as the White House imposed an escalating regime of restrictions against it.

The Trump administration targeted prosecutors and judges from the court first in February 2025 before announcing blanket sanctions on Oct. 9 this year. The EU has repeatedly backed the Court against Washington, but it has resisted calls to activate a mechanism that would forbid firms from complying with U.S. laws.

That has agonized senior figures in The Hague. Zavala Giler said the Commission’s “lack of clarity” left private companies and NGOs in the dark over whether they should comply with sanctions decided by Washington — and what risks they face if they don’t.

Zavala Giler’s call to the Commission adds to pressure from EU lawmakers for a swift response after the Oct. 9 announcement. Kallas told the European Parliament on Tuesday that Brussels would use the next few months “to open dialogue” on the issue. The new sanctions are set to take effect in April next year.

“What I would hope is that the space for dialogue is not interpreted as a space for waiting to protect the court,” Zavala Giler said, who spoke from his glass office on the eve of a visit to the Court’s headquarters by the EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas.

Damocles sword

Anticipating sweeping sanctions, the Court spent six months abandoning U.S. tech providers and moving to an open-source software environment, and 20 months to make its financial transactions dollar-proof. That move has been a huge undertaking for Zavala Giler’s team, he said.

The Court initially deepened its reliance on U.S. technology after it was hit by a massive cyber attack in 2023, but what seemed a solution at that time became a problem in the face of sanctions. Even though the current regime includes a carveout for telecommunications, there is no guarantee it will remain the case.

“It becomes a sort of Damocles sword on top of our head that could be revoked at any time,” Zavala Giler said. “I cannot count on U.S. tech companies anymore.”

U.S. platforms operate as entire ecosystems, offering all-encompassing solutions under a single contract. To do without them, “you need to start creating your own architecture and systems that need to speak to each other,” the registrar said.

Financial autonomy was equally hard to achieve. The Court mapped all its suppliers’ transactions to ensure there was no U.S. nexus, meaning that no U.S. person, bank or currency is involved in a payment. “We made all of our staff members have European bank accounts. It was a very detailed process that we had to do, person by person, company by company, making sure that the contracts were in euros,” the registrar said.

The Court also went from working with tens of banks to only “a few,” since only a handful of institutions are comfortable with dollar-proof payments.

Chilling effect

That situation is likely to worsen without clear guidance from EU countries and the Commission. As Zavala Giler put it, “if the International Criminal Court cannot transact in Europe, in euros within the SEPA zone with no U.S. nexus, then there is a bigger question about European financial sovereignty.”

The Court has long called the EU to use a legislative shield — known as blocking statute — that would forbid EU firms from complying with U.S. sanctions. The request was backed by dozens of lawmakers at the European Parliament, which incidentally awarded the court its human rights Sakharov Prize on Thursday.

The blocking statute “becomes an instrument to reassert the minimum space that should not be affected by unilateral extraterritorial sanctions … that minimum space should be, at the very least, the eurozone,” Zavala Giler said. Even without it, the court needs “the reassurances that, at least within the eurozone, [it] can continue to operate,” he added.

So far, however, the Commission has taken a cautious approach, choosing dialogue with the U.S. as a way of “buying time,” as a EU diplomat put it to POLITICO.

In a balancing act, EU heads of state and government backed Brussels’ diplomatic effort at their summit last week, while also committing to do whatever is needed to support the Court.

“I hope that now that the European Council has opened this door, the Commission will feel more comfortable in taking an extra step. And at the very least, providing some kind of clear guidance,” Zavala Giler said.

As an intermediate step, the registrar suggested the use of “comfort letters” reassuring firms that they should not comply with the U.S. measures.

Zavala Giler stressed that sanctions were not only a matter to address for banks and tech operators, as the current uncertainty has already affected NGOs working with the Court. NGOs play a critical role in supporting the work of the Court, for instance “to provide reparations for victims in Uganda” or “to assist the work of the court in providing assistance to victims in Ukraine.”

“This has created an enormous chilling effect,” he said. “They don’t know if they have the legal protections or not, to continue supporting the work of the court.”

The registrar’s office overlooks the moat circling the court’s six towers across the compound’s 46,000 square meters. In one of these buildings, the trial of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte over alleged crimes against humanity is due to begin next month. Reporters who will cover the proceeds won’t be allowed to use their phones — only paper and pen.

It is Zavala Giler’s job to oversee this huge institution, which relies on secure communications, cross-border funding for investigations and the contribution of many NGOs.

“This court has for victims the promise of the never again,” Zavala Giler said.

MADRID — The Spanish government has won a significant victory in a long-running legal dispute with international investors over its decision more than a decade ago to scrap renewable energy subsidies.

This week, a Belgian court overturned a ruling that ordered the Spanish government to pay investors nearly €76 million.

It was a major win for Spain, which has been fighting attempts to freeze its assets around the world from clean energy investors who claim they are owed at least €2 billion in subsidies.

The dispute dates back to 2013, in the middle of the European debt crisis, when cash-strapped Spain, then under a new conservative government, decided to remove subsidies for renewable energy. Investors who had poured money into Spanish renewables said this was a breach, as they had invested on the understanding they would receive the subsidies.

The International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes ruled that Spain must pay the money, but the European Commission has told Spain doing so would constitute unlawful state aid.

The standoff has played out all over the world, with investors attempting to freeze Spanish assets in multiple jurisdictions. In June, U.S. investment fund Blasket Renewable Investments LLC issued subpoenas demanding documents from Adidas, Hilton Hotels, and other entities involved in Spain’s Football World Cup participation to help with its bid to freeze Spanish assets.

In the end, the team went back home with its assets intact, along with the World Cup.

Spain also has cases going on in courts in Australia, Germany and the U.S.

In 2023, a British court ordered an embargo on an international school in London owned by the Spanish state. The Belgian court’s original decision was one of the few examples where investors were successful, and the decision this week to overturn it will set a precedent for other challenges.

The case

Spain’s defense persuaded a Belgian court to lift an embargo imposed in 2025 on state-owned air-navigation company Enaire for €75.76 million, according to documents seen by POLITICO.

The case was also brought by Blasket, which bought the dispute from an investment fund called RREEF. The European Commission intervened in support of Spain.

RREEF, which was originally linked to Deutsche Bank, invested in Spanish wind and solar power under a 2007 regulatory framework that guaranteed subsidies for renewable energy. In 2013, amid the economic crisis, the government of then-Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, of the conservative People’s Party, cut those subsidies to reduce electricity costs.

International investors turned to arbitration, arguing that the Energy Charter Treaty, an international agreement signed in the 1990s, guaranteed them fair and predictable treatment. The funds sought more than €10 billion in compensation, according to sources at Spain’s Environment Ministry.

The International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, part of the World Bank, which handled most of the arbitration cases, ruled against Spain, though it reduced the amount sought in many cases. The total awards came to about €2 billion. In its 2019 ruling, the tribunal ordered Spain to pay RREEF €59.6 million, plus interest and costs.

Most of the claims, including RREEF’s, were sold to Blasket, which began seeking to enforce the awards. The funds have searched for Spanish assets that could be seized to satisfy the claims.

Spain says it cannot pay because the European Commission has determined that doing so would constitute unlawful state aid. The funds invested through companies based in Luxembourg, and the EU’s top court ruled that the Energy Charter Treaty did not apply to disputes between EU investors and EU member states; EU law governed instead.

In August 2026, the Commission opened infringement proceedings against Spain over a €23 million payment on an award involving a Japanese company, which was not based in the EU.

On June 17, 2025, Blasket secured a Belgian court order freezing €75.76 million belonging to Enaire, the state-owned company that manages air navigation in Spain. Enaire receives payments from Eurocontrol, the Brussels-based European organization that collects air-navigation charges from airlines and distributes the proceeds.

That arrangement made it possible to freeze Spanish public funds in Belgium. After a legal dispute, Spain deposited €75,759,538 on May 4, 2026.

The freeze was a high-profile win for investors pursuing Spain. They have secured other attachments in the United Kingdom and are engaged in ongoing U.S. court disputes over enforcement of the awards.

Spain appealed, and the European Commission intervened on its behalf. The Belgian state also argued that the attachment breached EU law. The Belgian court has now ruled in Spain’s favor, lifting the freeze and ordering Blasket to pay the legal costs.

That leaves Spain in a stronger position against international investors seeking to enforce the awards — at least within the EU.

As Europe plans its response to the neurological disease burden, a fundamental measurement gap is being overlooked — and the cost of ignoring it is being felt.

A briefing requested earlier this year by the European Parliament’s Committee on Public Health (SANT) put it plainly: neurological diseases are one of Europe’s most urgent and rapidly expanding health, social and economic challenges. Published in February 2026, it calls for a coordinated European plan linking prevention, early diagnosis, research and innovation.¹ But before Europe considers what that plan should look like, a foundational question demands attention: are we measuring the right things?

Multiple sclerosis (MS), a chronic, progressive disease of the central nervous system that disrupts communication between the brain and the body, offers a revealing case study. Consider a woman in her mid-30s, working, raising a family, managing what her neurologist calls “stable” MS. She has not slept properly in years, her memory has been slipping and she is cutting her hours at work. Her last clinical note reads: “No change.” On paper, she is stable, but in reality she is anything but.

Her story is not unusual. According to research commissioned by Sanofi^*, the gap between what health systems measure and what people with MS experience may be costing individuals, families and economies more than we realize.³

The stakes for Europe

Over 3 million people globally live with MS and Europe has the highest prevalence, at 133 per 100,000 people.^2,3 The condition strikes primarily during prime working years, meaning hundreds of thousands of people are navigating a progressive, unpredictable disease at precisely the point when inadequate support is felt most acutely.³

That support begins with measurement. And right now, the tools used to assess MS in clinical practice do not fully capture what people with the disease experience.³

The consequences extend far beyond the clinic: 82 percent of people with severe MS rely on unpaid family caregiving, yet this burden rarely appears in standard health data or policy design.³ When the full impact of disease is not measured, health systems can underestimate need, delay support, and overlook the wider effects on work, welfare and family life.³

The measurement gap

The Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS), the primary tool used to measure MS disability, was developed in 1983 to assess walking ability. We now know that MS affects far more than mobility. Fatigue affects 94 percent of people with MS, while 75 percent report cognitive difficulties, but both are absent in the EDSS assessment.³ In a field where clinical consensus is rare, seven in ten neurologists agree: a more comprehensive approach is needed.³

Growing recognition of smouldering neuroinflammation has made the need for new methods of quantifying MS progression increasingly urgent. This slow, chronic disease activity can persist even when a patient appears clinically stable, with effects that are subtle, cumulative and easy to miss until significant damage has already occurred.⁴

This is why Sanofi initiated the development of the Smouldering Associated Worsening (SAW) Index⁺. The SAW Index Study — led by an international steering committee of leading MS clinicians, researchers and patient advocates — is due to complete in 2027. Based on hundreds of hours of in-depth qualitative research with people with MS, the goal of the SAW Index is to provide neurologists with a comprehensive measurement framework that bridges the gap between lived experience and what clinical tools are currently able to detect.

According to the European Multiple Sclerosis Platform, people with MS experience an average of 14 symptoms within the first five years of diagnosis, with fatigue, sensory problems, sleep disturbances, cognitive impairment and balance problems among the most common.⁵ These are precisely the experiences the SAW Index is designed to surface, replacing static labels like “moderately affected” with measurement metrics grounded in the experience and words of people with MS.

The cost of this gap

These aspects of MS can be challenging to quantify and are associated with substantial societal and economic burdens. Lifetime productivity loss per person with MS ranges from €394,000 in France to €668,000 in Germany.³ The cost profile shifts significantly as the disease progresses: in mild MS, direct healthcare costs dominate; in severe MS, indirect costs become the primary driver.³ Indeed, lost wages, absenteeism, early retirement, disability payments and the growing burden on unpaid carers outweigh medical costs in many countries, placing growing long-term pressure on social insurance and disability systems.³

Early identification of progression could change that trajectory, extending years of employment, preserving household income, and reducing long-term dependence on disability and social benefits.^3,6 That is a cost-avoidance opportunity current measurement frameworks are missing.

Progress in motion

There is no single fix, but there is momentum.

MS care has advanced significantly in recent decades: diagnosis is happening earlier, treatment options have expanded and the focus is shifting from relapse control alone to slowing long-term disability progression.⁷ Furthermore, there is growing recognition of the importance of cognition, mental health, rehabilitation and the day-to-day realities that shape whether people living with MS can remain independent and active.⁸

The challenge now is to ensure policy keeps pace with that progress, and better measurement is part of the answer. If Europe wants health spending to deliver lasting value, it should see these improvements not as costs to be managed, but as investments in independence, participation, productivity and more sustainable health systems.

Time to act

The European Parliament’s SANT Committee has called for a fully funded European neurological health plan — one with the scale and ambition of Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan, aligning health, research and societal action in a unified framework.¹ MS offers a clear and immediate test case for what that ambition looks like in practice.

But ambitious plans require accurate data. If Europe is serious about a coordinated response to neurological disease, getting measurement right is not a secondary concern; it is the foundation on which everything else depends.

The people living with MS across the continent cannot wait for the tools that measure their disease to catch up with the science that understands it. Neither should policymakers.

^*Research commissioned by Sanofi. All editorial control retained by Economist Impact.
⁺Sanofi initiated and funds the SAW Index Study.

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References

1. European Parliament. Strengthening Brain Health: Policy Recommendations to Tackle the Rising Burden of Neurological Diseases. Available at: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/telastatic/cmsdata/302850/Briefing_Strengthening%20Brain%20Health_EN.pdf. Accessed: September 2026
2. MS International Federation. MS Atlas. Available at: https://atlasofms.org/map/global/epidemiology/number-of-people-with-ms. Accessed: September 2026
3. Economist Impact. Measuring what matters: Bridging the gap between disability impact and economic burden in multiple sclerosis. Available at: https://impact.economist.com/health-society/measuring-what-matters. Accessed: September 2026
4. Scalfari, A, et al. (2024) Smouldering-Associated Worsening in Multiple Sclerosis: An International Consensus Statement on Definition, Biology, Clinical Implications, and Future Directions. Ann Neurol 2024;00:1. DOI: 10.1002/ana.27034.
5. European Multiple Sclerosis Platform. (n.d.). Impact of multiple sclerosis symptoms (IMSS) [Fact sheet]. Accessed: October 2026
6. Cicely Dudley, Victoria Donnaloja and Karen Steadman. A guide for Health Care Professionals to have Conversations on Work with People with Multiple Sclerosis. Available at: https://emsp.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Ready-for-Work-Employment-Guide.pdf. Accessed: September 2026
7. Montague T, Drummond J, Ng K, Parratt J. Advancements in multiple sclerosis. Intern Med J. 2025 Jun;55(6):895-904. DOI: 10.1111/imj.70023.
8. Giovannoni G, et al. MS care: integrating advanced therapies and holistic management. Front Neurol. 2024 Jan 30;14:1286122. doi: 10.3389/fneur.2023    

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Disclaimer

POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT

• The sponsor is Sanofi.
• The political advertisement is linked to driving action in how neurological disease is measured in the EU (using MS as a case study) and driving action around the briefing requested by the SANT committee aimed at strengthening brain health (Policy Recommendations to Tackle the Rising Burden of Neurological Diseases).

More information here.

BRUSSELS — EU leaders will go back to the drawing board in November as they race to finalize a deal on the bloc’s next seven-year budget by the end of the year.

During the first day of a two-day summit in Brussels on Thursday, European Council President António Costa announced he was convening an additional gathering on Nov. 26 in a bid to overcome disagreements and lay the ground for a final deal in December. To bring the sides closer to an agreement, he will present new budget figures before the meeting, according to an EU official, who was granted anonymity to discuss the confidential planning.

Costa is pressing leaders to finalize negotiations by the end of the year — before elections in France, Italy and Poland in 2027 threaten to derail the talks.

In a speech to the leaders, Costa warned that going past the end-of-year deadline will delay EU payments to farmers and researchers past Jan. 1, 2028, when the new budget is scheduled to come into force.

If leaders fail to reach a deal in December, the electoral calendar might push an agreement to May or even October 2027, Costa warned leaders in his concluding remarks, according to two EU diplomats briefed on the discussions.

Pressure on governments

Costa’s plan received a major boost on Thursday from French President Emmanuel Macron, who told fellow leaders that he won’t have a political mandate to sign a deal close to the French presidential elections in April 2027.

This is a major reversal for France, which has previously been unwilling to commit to the end-of-year deadline.

Macron’s words put more pressure on governments to advance the talks over the coming weeks — although some cast doubt on his good intentions.

“There are so many elections next year. [French far-right leader Marine] Le Pen herself [said] it’s undemocratic if we were now to agree,” said one EU diplomat.

Just hours before the leaders’ gathering, Le Pen renewed calls to halve France’s contributions to the EU budget if she wins the presidential elections next year.

She said that rushing the budget agreement before the French elections would be “a democratic scandal.”

The new frugal

Costa is stuck between messy domestic politics across Europe and hardening stances among the EU’s 27 leaders.

The so-called frugal EU countries pushing for major budget cuts — Germany, Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, Denmark and Finland — have publicly said that an Irish proposal envisioning €159 billion cuts doesn’t go far enough.

On Thursday, the six hardliners were joined by Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever, who joked in a press conference after the summit that “I’m married to a Dutch person so I’m very frugal also in my personal life.”

However, behind closed doors the budget hardliners employed a more conciliatory tone.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz — the unofficial leader of the frugal camp — said that the Irish proposal has achieved progress despite reductions still being needed, said two EU diplomats briefed on the discussions.

He pointed to EU payouts to poorer regions, as opposed to farmer’s subsidies, as an avenue for cuts.

On the other side of the spectrum, Spanish Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez — who will try to cling on to power in an election on Nov. 29 — insisted that the budget is way too small.

“It is a distribution of misery,” he told fellow leaders during the discussions, according to the diplomats. He was joined by Italy’s right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni — an ideological foe on most issues, but an ally of sorts in the budget battle. She insisted that no further cuts to the budget will be accepted.

To bring sides together closer to a deal, Costa promised to advance progress on EU-wide taxes, or own resources, to finance the next seven-year budget and reduce national contributions.  

He will explore the European Parliament’s proposed taxes on crypto firms, online gambling and tech giants as well as a Greek idea to funnel future national sales of 6G mobile spectrum to the EU budget.

But given the level of opposition, getting EU countries to agree to any of these options will no be no mean feat.

“It is time to be realistic and work on what is plausible and reasonable, instead of wishful thinking,” said another EU diplomat.

Ukraine’s strikes on data centers inside Russia aimed to disrupt military planning and communication services. There were also reports of another kind of disruption: to customers waiting for their dinner from food-delivery apps.

Kyiv’s drone strikes on three Yandex data centers in Sasovo, Kaluga and Vladimir saw delays and interruptions for thousands of businesses and households that rely on Yandex’s cloud infrastructure, including e-commerce, digital payment platforms and apps of food delivery and car services. Ukrainian drones on Wednesday targeted a major Sberbank data center in Russia’s Saratov region, though a senior company executive said it hadn’t affected operations.

After the strikes on Russian data centers, Kyiv noted that Moscow has already repeatedly targeted its digital infrastructure. “Ukrainians wanted to show Russians that two can play this game,” a senior official familiar with the operation told POLITICO, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

The attacks and counter-attacks point to a new frontline in war: the infrastructure powering the digital economy.

The attacks on the buildings that supply compute power are akin to striking a power plant supplying the electricity, heating and fuel that both militaries and civilians depend on. It may weaken an enemy’s war effort but can also bring everyday life to a standstill.

Experts say the cost of rebuilding in Russia will be particularly high as the centers require scarce materials that must be imported. “Obtaining a large amount of equipment to replace what was destroyed is not going to be easy,” said Oleg Shakirov, a cyber policy and international security researcher, noting that most hardware needs to be imported and that is complicated by high global demand and sanctions on Russia.

“To be honest, no one really knows what’s the actual damage. Since two data centers are still offline, we can assume that it’s significant,” said Shakirov.

Joseph Jarnecki, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, warned that normalizing strikes to data centers could have a new set of dangerous consequences.

“These strikes likely breach International Humanitarian Law and it’s a big risk when global populations increasingly rely on digital services,” he told POLITICO.

When servers become targets

Data centers have entered the crosshairs of other recent armed conflicts. During the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran earlier this year, drone strikes hit three Amazon Web Services (AWS) facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

Since data centers can serve civilian and military purposes simultaneously, the legal status of targeting them is far from straightforward.

Kubo Mačák, an expert on international humanitarian law, said a data center must meet two conditions to qualify as a military objective under the Geneva Conventions: it must make an effective contribution to military operations and destroying it must offer a “definite military advantage.”

“If you know that they are storing military intelligence or that they’re using the data center to power military artificial intelligence tools,” Mačák said, there could be grounds to consider it a military objective.

Following the most recent strikes of the Yandex data centers, users on social media platform X reported a sudden drop in automated bot activity, including from accounts associated with pro-Russian, pro-Trump and Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) narratives.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy seized on the reports to boast that the strikes had made social media less toxic, even as independent researchers and national research institutes found no evidence they specifically disrupted any Russian disinformation campaigns.

Mačák said that even if a data center is being used to “let’s say, run some trolls or these bot farms to interfere with elections abroad … that would not be sufficient.” In other words, hosting propaganda bots does not, by itself, make a data center a lawful military target.

The dual-use quandary has often focused on the targeting of energy infrastructure, which has been frequent in the Russia-Ukraine war. On Saturday, U.S. President Donald Trump urged Ukraine to stop striking Russian oil refineries, blaming the attacks for rising fuel prices. He has since called for both sides to halt attacks on energy infrastructure, although the existence of any ceasefire agreement remains disputed.

As data centers become increasingly central to national economies, they will become more consequential targets. A senior NATO official granted anonymity to discuss the matter told POLITICO that data centers are already considered potential targets and that the alliance is factoring their vulnerability into its planning.

NATO allies recognize that their data centers could come under attack in a conflict, the official said: “We would get it in a fight.”

Veronika Melkozerova in Kyiv contributed to this report.

BRUSSELS ― Political pressure is leaving Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz poorly placed to break the deadlock over the EU’s next seven-year budget.

As EU leaders gather for a two-day summit in Brussels from Thursday, the heads of the bloc’s two largest countries hold the keys to breaking the impasse between capitals that has persisted for months, as a Germany-led group advocating a smaller budget clashes with those like France which are resisting reductions.

“Delays and persisting divisions in the Council [representing EU governments] are worrying,” said Siegfried Mureșan, co-leading the European Parliament’s work on the MFF, the multiannual financial framework. “The EU budget can only be built through compromise … The faster we adopt the budget, the faster we can implement it and become more competitive, safer, help farmers and researchers and protect our borders and cyberspace.”

Sealing agreement on the EU’s long-term central budget, worth approximately €2 trillion, is the biggest challenge over the next few months facing leaders, all of whom must sign up to the final numbers. While it isn’t just up to Macron and Merz, getting the chiefs of the bloc’s two most powerful countries to overcome their differences would be a massive step in making all the pieces of the jigsaw slot into place.

But with Macron soon to leave office and Merz under severe pressure domestically, officials and diplomats in Brussels, Paris, and Berlin are playing down hopes of a Franco-German breakthrough this week.

“If the French and German leaders come hand in hand, I think that could change the game,” an EU diplomat, granted anonymity to speak frankly, said. “You need [Italian Prime Minister Giorgia] Meloni and [Polish Prime Minister Donald] Tusk, but it starts with Merz and Macron.”

While Merz and Macron may talk bilaterally during the summit, according to an Elysée official, there were no firm plans for a more formal sit-down, two EU diplomats said, adding they were expecting them to use the two-day meeting to hash out positions.

Domestic political weakness makes both leaders less likely to yield ground, three EU diplomats said.

Backfiring

For the French president, who leaves office next year, the fear is that making big concessions — like accepting cuts demanded by Berlin — could be weaponized by presidential candidates vying to replace him.

“Macron should not appear too conciliatory” in budget talks, said an ally of the French president. “It would backfire in the presidential campaign.”

Indeed, Macron may be wary of striking a deal that could lead to attacks from far-right leader Marine Le Pen or far-left rival Jean-Luc Mélenchon, both of whom argue that France receives too little value for its contributions to the EU pot.

During a press conference in Brussels on Wednesday evening, Le Pen accused negotiators of speeding up talks as “an attempt to stifle future democratic choices before they even take place” — effectively warning Macron against locking in an agreement before France’s April presidential election and votes in other major EU countries, such as Spain, which goes to the polls next month, and Italy, which is due to hold a poll next year.

“All this is not serious,” Le Pen told reporters on the 26th floor of The Hotel in Brussels.

It’s complicated

Merz faces similar political pressures.

Following humiliating state election defeats to the far-right Alternative for Germany party, the Chancellor is wary of concessions that could be framed as sending more taxpayer money to Brussels. Berlin prefers no deal at all to one that increases the overall budget, Merz said.

But Paris and Berlin’s positions may not be as far apart as public statements suggest.

“It’s complicated because France and Germany both need to step outside of their comfort zone,” said the Macron ally. “But it will end with a deal between France and Germany,”

France’s Europe minister Benjamin Haddad told reporters on Tuesday that discussions should focus on raising money via taxes, or “own resources” as they’re known in the EU —such as online gambling levies—rather than “massive cuts.”

However, Paris also wants to “stabilize national contributions” ― in other words, keep its own payments level.

Berlin was “open to examine new own resources, but we are more skeptical than the French that it will generate enough money,” a German official said.

France is betting that when push comes to shove, Merz will give in to pressure from other countries — and German captains of industry — to abandon his demands for far-reaching cuts.

“I see that there is also a real debate in Germany as well on the fact of having a position that would only be focused on cuts to the detriment of future policies,” an Elysée official said Wednesday. This week, Germany’s industrial lobby BDI and top industry groups urged their government to defend a more ambitious EU budget.

Macron and Merz showed unity earlier this month by jointly urging the European Commission to toughen its stance on China. But they still struggle to agree on another major deal—first reported by POLITICO in July—where Berlin accepts stronger “Made in Europe” rules in exchange for France backing relaxed car emission targets and the 2035 combustion engine ban.

EU Industry chief Stéphane Séjourné told POLITICO on Tuesday he supported the deal to finalize both files. Macron recently called the agreement “imminent,” suggesting progress depended on German coalition talks. But their failure to present an agreement at this week’s Paris car show confirms Paris and Berlin still disagree on terms, with the Elysée confirming negotiations remain ongoing.

The NPCI, which operates the UPI network, said it was postponing the planned October 15 rollout of the 0.4% fee due to the festive shopping season.